When a President Became a God
Look straight up inside the U.S. Capitol dome and you will find George Washington enthroned among the clouds, surrounded by goddesses — the founding father transformed into myth.
High above the rotunda floor of the United States Capitol, 180 feet up, a circular canvas of painted plaster hangs suspended over visitors who crane their necks to see it. This is The Apotheosis of Washington, a fresco covering 4,664 square feet, its figures stretched up to 15 feet tall so they can be read from the ground far below. It is the work of Constantino Brumidi, a Greek-Italian artist who spent eleven months in 1865 painting it, working at the tail end of the American Civil War.
Brumidi came to this commission with an unusual résumé. He had spent three years working in the Vatican under Pope Gregory XVI, and had served aristocratic patrons across Italy, including the prince Torlonia, decorating palaces and villas. In 1852 he immigrated to the United States, and for much of the last twenty-five years of his life he made the Capitol his canvas, eventually also designing the ornate Brumidi Corridors on the first floor of the Senate wing. For the dome fresco, completed shortly after the dome itself was finished in 1863, he was paid $40,000 — worth roughly $841,304 today.
The painting's title announces its ambition plainly: apotheosis, the ascension of a mortal into godhood. Washington, first president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, is shown seated among the heavens, elevated beyond history into allegory. He wears purple, the color draped over generals of the ancient Roman Republic during their triumphal processions, and beneath his feet arches a rainbow.
He does not sit alone. To his left is Victoria, the goddess of victory, robed in green and blowing a horn. To his right stands Liberty, wearing a red Roman liberty cap — the pileus once given to freed slaves as a mark of manumission. In her right hand she holds a fasces, and in her other hand an open book, toward which Washington gestures with his right hand, as if pointing history's readers toward its pages.
Encircling this trio are thirteen maidens, each crowned with a single star, representing the original Thirteen Colonies. Notably, several of these figures turn their backs to Washington — understood to represent the colonies that had seceded from the Union at the very moment Brumidi was painting them, during the Civil War. Across the circle from Washington floats a banner reading E Pluribus Unum, Latin for 'out of many, one,' a motto whose meaning would have felt especially raw in 1865.
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